Help

Author: Steve Zultanski

Publisher: Golias Books (2024)

Death-obsessed, whiny, disengaged, and overinvested—the four long poems in Help theatricalize feelings that are usually considered childish. The author set up conversations and games between friends which were then transcribed, edited, and embellished. Participants were asked to talk about the deaths of acquaintances, secret hiding places, unmet needs, and childhood methods for rejecting attention. The resulting poems mostly read like scripts for unrealized plays. Real-life speech is pinned to the page, stuck. Individual voices appear like specimens. Someone demands endless love, but not from anyone in particular. Memories are intensely personal but frustratingly general, like the psychological droppings of missing protagonists. The effect is both unsettling and surprisingly warm.

In Help, the characters find intimacy in secondhand stories, morbid gossip, and performative neediness. As they converse about death and solitude, their titillation is indistinguishable from empathy. These poems take that titillation seriously on its own terms, promising no payoff beyond the rather common pleasures of voyeurism and confession.